History Unwrapped

A computer scientist reveals the text of ancient documents beyond repair.

By Mark Barna
May 9, 2017 5:00 AMNov 21, 2019 6:36 PM
ancient scroll getting scanned 8_DSC-CR0617_06
Computer scientist Brent Seales uses software to unravel damaged scrolls, like this one, once thought unreadable. (Credit: Stephen Bailey/Center for Visualization & Virtual Environments/University of Kentucky)

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Brent Seales has made a career of unlocking lost secrets. With specialized software he and his team developed, the University of Kentucky computer scientist can read ancient scrolls too fragile to unroll. Recently, he watched as Hebrew consonants from the charred remains of an ancient Jewish scroll flashed across a computer screen.

Archaeologists discovered the scroll in 1970 at En-Gedi, the site of an ancient synagogue in Israel that burned in the sixth century. The fire reduced the document to a charred lump that crumbled at the slightest touch. But last year, Seales’ software virtually unwrapped a three-dimensional scan of the scroll’s internal structure, flattening the text to two-dimensional images. Centuries after it was last read, the scroll’s writing was once again accessible. Inside were two chapters of the Book of Leviticus; researchers carbon dated the ink to as early as the third century.

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